ETH Zurich and KNIME Collaborate on High Content Screening Platform HC/DC

20 March, 2009 - 16:25 — fabian.dill

Zurich, Switzerland and Konstanz, Germany - We are happy to announce an academic partnership with the Data Handling Unit of High Content Screening Facility - RISC at the ETH Zurich, Switzerland. Content of this partnership is a close collaboration on the KNIME-based High Content Screening Platform HC/DC.

HC/DC has been developed by the Data Handling Unit of High Content Screening Facility – RISC, at the ETH Zurich.

High Content Screening (HCS) is increasingly used for the automated evaluation of spatio-temporally resolved multiple biochemical and morphological parameters in cellular systems. HCS data include comprehensive information about the bioactive molecules, the targeted genes, and images as well as their extracted data matrices after acquisition. The architecture of HC/DC is based on the KNIME platform and the Eclipse plug-in framework. HC/DC is a functional set of nodes for HCS, working together with KNIME and imageJ.

A plug-in for opening and processing proprietary HCS files (library management, numeric results and images) was developed within the KNIME environment. All those open source components (Eclipse environment, KNIME, R-Project, Weka and ImageJ) were chosen for its platform-independence, openness, simplicity, and portability. They are also the fastest pure Java image-, data-processing programs currently available.

Next steps: large scale biological data management, high content screening library handling, support image based experiments, results handling, data mining, screening plate based data visualization.